Grandmother's Birthday

A childhood friend from Oklahoma City, Linda, caught up with me on Facebook sometime in the last year. The main things we had in common were that I had a crush on her big brother and our mothers got along very well. My friend married her steady boyfriend she'd had since she was 14 about five minutes after graduating high school. They are still married 40 some years later, with four children and ten (!) grandchildren. The brother was killed in a car accident a few years ago, a real tragedy. Strangely, life goes on.

Linda posted a picture of a banana pudding she'd made, in memory of her mother in law. The customary recipe is generally made from a box but then the resulting pudding - or custard - is topped with vanilla wafers, something I've never seen here in Britain, though to be fair I don't spend time in the 'biscuit' aisle. 

When I asked her for the name of the dessert, which made me strike the side of my head, of course it was banana pudding, she mentioned that they missed her mother in law. I commented that I missed my parents and grandparents who had all been gone for 30 or 40 years by now. I said I appreciated Thanksgiving because making the traditional foods were a special way to remember Mom and Grandmother in particular.

Linda remembered coming to my Grandmother's for Thanksgiving one year. She remembered Grandmother wagging the turkey neck and making rude jokes. I hadn't thought about that for ages but it all came back. I remarked that Grandmother was one of a kind and maybe it was just as well.  A guy named Mitchell - a complete stranger to me - commented lol.

This story isn't generally how I like to remember Grandmother but it is totally how she was at times. She could on one had be panicked about her beauty shop customers abandoning her if she wasn't seen as respectable and on the other hand she could tell the rudest jokes and swear like a sailor. Definitely one of a kind.